Client users interact with information via user interfaces, such as menus of data items (e.g., buttons, tiles, icons and/or text). Part of the user interface may include images, such as displayed on tiles used to represent selectable menu items, e.g., items corresponding to movies, television shows and other video content.
The images that are suitable for one device may not be suitable for another device. For example, a large television screen may show relatively large, high-resolution images whereas a smaller display such as on a smartphone or tablet device may need smaller images with appropriate resolutions. Further, an image may be customized to a device, e.g., composite a title over an image at a specific location with a specific font for device A, and do something different for device B. To make available the many (e.g., thousands) of images needed, one alternative is to have a team of people manually composite the featured images using image tools, with various sets of properties for the different types of consumer devices that will be displaying those images. This is labor and resource intensive.
An alternative is to have each client device download the images in generally the same format/resolution, then composite a final image for each rendering at the client. This is computationally expensive and does not work well for low-performance devices.